Process - Part 7

“But Process, meanwhile, works intuitively within them, pulling them toward interdependence and union and mutuality.  Their minds are beginning to comprehend that they are not alone…that they are part of everything and everything is part of them…and that all things (including them) depend dynamically upon all other things and contribute to the common ‘becoming’ that is the nature of Nature.

“The trouble is that they don’t have a story as yet to tie up all these new insights and emerging intuitions.  But good stories tend to take on a life of their own once the key elements are discovered.  The question is, what story will unfold from these elements?

1. There are only superficial differences among human beings, whatever their gender, race, politics, socioeconomic status, educational background, or religion.
2. People are not superior in kind, but only in degree from other forms of life which are their co-sojourners in the endless dance of evolving Process.
3. This awareness is not demeaning, but rather magnificently enhancing – they are related directly to everything and the Whole of which they are a conscious part, has a common destiny.
4. Without embarrassment, they can embrace a dog and call it ‘brother,’ and lie in the moss and call it ‘cousin.’
5. The human preoccupation with tearing from Nature the wherewithal to fabricate things necessitated their learning how Nature works and what they have discovered discloses to them the truth that they might better work with her than against her.
6. Humanity emerged from the cosmic process as a unique intelligence, they were not placed here as a special creation.
7. There is no sharp boundary between transcendence and immanence - everything is interpenetrated by everything else.
8. Reality is infinitely relational.
9. All things are constantly in a state of becoming and that change, not stasis, is a primary state of things.
10. Nature’s processes are remedial and transformative.
11. Nature is not willfully coercive nor consciously hateful, it is one, balanced, organic Whole.
12. Embedded in Nature is directionality:  the principle that preserves the identity of each thing while it simultaneously undergoes change and modification, an observation that has them rethinking the notion of a Supreme Cosmic Plan.

“In possession of this information, they’re doing pretty well with dogs, moss, and whales, and tree toads, and landscapes, and dolphins and seashells, and hybrid tomatoes, but they’re still very cautious with their fellow humans.  Most of them don’t believe the old stories anymore, but they think they do, and insist on building their lifestyles, societal styles, institutional styles, and national styles upon them.  They know the dangers inherent in openness, in giving, in telling, in feeling, in touching, in listening, or experimenting too much.  Their tendency is to think it safer to give only conditionally, to tell only partially, to do as little as possible, to feel only sparingly, to listen selectively, and to touch only if necessary. 

“One recent false prophet summed up the anti-interdependent inclinations with the phrase, ‘nice guys finish last.’  Another said, ‘being nice is how a person pays his way into the party if he hasn’t the guts to be tough or the class to be brilliant.’  They both miss the point, but it sounds right because that’s what they’ve learned through harsh experience.

So let me stop here before I conclude the recitation of Process, and pose a question to you:  what story will you write?